1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) operations and, in particular, to exposing J2C interface properties in such operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Historically, Enterprise Information/integration Systems (EIS), such as legacy mainframe systems, and, more recently, commercial applications, have been at the center of modern information technology environments, providing critical data for enterprise operations. Companies have big investments in their Enterprise Information Systems. While many applications may be old, some may be new. The EIS provides the company with the quality of service required by the company. An example application, known as a “transactional” application, allows updates to be made to a bank account. Although these systems continue to be critically important to many businesses, these businesses may further rely on other applications. As these other applications are often web or wireless applications, there appears to be an increasing need to integrate web and wireless applications with legacy mainframe systems and existing commercial applications. Such integration requires the real-time exchange of information and services by a range of interested parties. The new applications, for which this integration is required, are increasingly being developed in the Java™ programming language.
As a required element of the Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), the Java ConnectorArchitecture (J2C) provides a standardized means to integrate Java applications with EISs (Java is a Trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.) J2C defines a Common Client Interface (CCI). The CCI defines a standard client Application Programming Interface (API) for application components. The CCI enables application components and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks to drive interactions across heterogeneous EISs using a common client API. Interfaces that are part of the CCI include “interactionSpec” and “connectionSpec”; these interfaces are further described hereinafter.
As mentioned hereinbefore, companies may have business requirements to enable web access to these services. To extend the previous example of a banking application, there may be a requirement to enable access to bank accounts over the Internet. The J2EE Connector architecture (J2C) provides an environment so that an EIS can provide a resource adapter that can plug in to any application server so that the application server can generically provide qualities of service to all resource adapters, and optionally, through the CCI, the resource adapter can implement the common client programming model for the enterprise application. Such J2C services may further be extended to be web services.
Integration of Java applications with EIS may be accomplished through the use of J2C. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL), with its extensions, allows the description of many different kinds of services: Web services, Java services, Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) services, Java Message Service (JMS) services, J2C services, etc. The Web Services Invocation Framework provides a common way of invoking each of these services. The WSIF supports a simple Java™ API for invoking Web services. Use of the WSIF API allows clients to invoke services focusing on an abstract service description, that is, the portion of WSDL that covers port types, operations and message exchanges without referring to real protocols.
As mentioned hereinbefore, WSDL is extensible to allow the description of many types of services other than web services. With WSIF, any of these types of services may be invoked in a common fashion. However, WSIF does not expose certain J2C properties, thus constraining certain applications.